This new translation of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques, first published in 1874, aims to re-introduce Barbey to Anglophone readers. The six stories are highly dramatic, psychologically intense ...
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This new translation of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques, first published in 1874, aims to re-introduce Barbey to Anglophone readers. The six stories are highly dramatic, psychologically intense and extreme in both subject matter and style, reflecting Barbey’s unique sensibility. The stories combine horror, comedy, and irony in disturbing and memorable ways, but they are also thematically probing, especially in their indictment of what Barbey saw as a soulless and oppressive modernity. Barbey evolved a richly poetic aesthetic to battle the modern bent toward scientism, positivism, and commodification. This translation seeks to find an analogue in English for Barbey’s complex style. Barbey blends elements associated with the oral tale-teller, something like Leskov, with the highly literary, allusive qualities of a more elite writer like Henry James. His sentences blend the qualities of the spoken word with suddenly labyrinthine structures, embeddings, and digressions. The style mirrors the man’s sensibility, and the translation endeavors to do both justice.Less

Diaboliques : Six Tales of Decadence

Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

Published in print: 2015-09-01

This new translation of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques, first published in 1874, aims to re-introduce Barbey to Anglophone readers. The six stories are highly dramatic, psychologically intense and extreme in both subject matter and style, reflecting Barbey’s unique sensibility. The stories combine horror, comedy, and irony in disturbing and memorable ways, but they are also thematically probing, especially in their indictment of what Barbey saw as a soulless and oppressive modernity. Barbey evolved a richly poetic aesthetic to battle the modern bent toward scientism, positivism, and commodification. This translation seeks to find an analogue in English for Barbey’s complex style. Barbey blends elements associated with the oral tale-teller, something like Leskov, with the highly literary, allusive qualities of a more elite writer like Henry James. His sentences blend the qualities of the spoken word with suddenly labyrinthine structures, embeddings, and digressions. The style mirrors the man’s sensibility, and the translation endeavors to do both justice.